Saturday, August 08, 2015

Oh how I miss the golden age of blogging and Frank Schilling's posts. See if you agree.

May 16, 2012

Good Morning Folks,

Brand Visionary, Frank Schilling, took a brief moment out of blogging hibernation today writing, "all of us who have the pleasure and privilege of participating in the evolution of the naming system have to concede that we are living through epic and most-interesting times."

For the last twelve years, Frank's team has slowly and methodically built one of the largest and most valuable privately owned collections of domain names on the Internet. The domain names in Frank's catalog represent an irreplaceable life's work.

How did a simple guy like him beat the world's biggest brands to a precious collection of 200,000 of the most premium domain names on the planet; those under appreciated branding assets that he owns that will be at the core of 21st Century business success? He blames it or credits it to "the boulevard of broken dreams" writing:

"On any given day, a random slice of the name-space expires for non-payment. 15,000, 20,000, 25000 names expire each day. I have watched these expiring name lists every day, for the better part of a decade. These lists are a virtual "boulevard of broken dreams" .. names which people bought with great hope, only to allow them to slip away after they had some emotional change of heart or after they forgot to renew them. 90-95% of these expiring names are complete and total crap. You could make-up better names in the unregistered available pool.

The remaining 5-10% are names which could have some traffic or some value to more than one person. Names which could be called meaningful, powerful or generic. That's 5-10 million domain names globally. It doesn't take a mathematician to determine that there are just not enough great names to go around. It's not possible for every person or company to have even one "good" registration. That shortage of supply and global demand keeps prices high... and will for years to come. In fact if the examples above show anything, it's that great domain names are "still" cheap."

In preparation for a world of SIRI where your name is spoken, not typed, and graphically expressed on an iPhone app symbol that can universally be understood around the world as simply as a road sign or airline safety card, a new report suggests that 50% of existing brand names are fundamentally flawed and these expensive branding mistakes must be fixed while the limited supply of available corrective options still exists.

While fixing broken brands will drive an unprecedented demand for domain names, there are still few available domain names that can pass the SIRI test.

In other words Which is why I thought about Frank's scarcity is REAL while Seth Godin suggest anyone can play the "invented scarcity" card to their advantage. Here's how:

One day, you may be lucky enough to have a scarcity problem. A product or a service or even a job that's in such high demand that people are clamoring for more than you can make.

We can learn a lot from the abysmal performance of Apple this weekend. They took a hot product and totally botched the launch because of a misunderstanding of the benefits and uses of scarcity.First, understand that scarcity is a choice. If you raise your price, scarcity goes away. If your product is going to be scarce, it's either because you benefit from that or because your organization is forbidden to use price as a demand-adjustment tool. I'm going to assume the former. (But I riff a bit on the latter toward the end)Why be scarce?

Scarcity also creates word of mouth, because people talk about lines and shortages and hot products.

And finally, scarcity drives your product to the true believers, the ones most likely to spread the word and ignite the ideavirus. Because they expended effort to acquire your product or service, they're not only more likely to talk about it, but they've self-selected as the sort of person likely to talk about it.

The danger is that you can kill long-term loyalty. You can annoy your best customers. You can spread negative word of mouth. You can train people to hate your scarcity strategy (Apple did all four this weekend).Take a look at the guy in the photo. That's the goal. He feels great. He's a hero, at least for a moment, all because he stood in line all night. He gets to talk about it and others (not everyone, but enough) aspire to be him next time. You reward the tribe and you build the tribe at the same time.

The problem is that our kneejerk way of dealing with scarcity is to treat everyone the same and to have people 'pay' by spending time to indicate their desire.Waiting in line is a very old-school way of dealing with scarcity. And treating new customers like old customers, treating unknown customers the same as high-value customers is painful and unnecessary.Smart marketers understand that scarcity (intentional or not) is a tool, one that can be used to enhance the story, not detract from it.

Uber-smart domain investor Rick Schwartz agrees, "I realized early on that there was great value to having straightforward, easy-to-remember, easy to spell, meaningful, domain names for a standalone sites. I felt that it was best to try to acquire these names sooner rather than later because the demand for simple names would only increase and the demand would drive up prices later."Adds Schilling, "Even if you back-up and cast as wide a net as possible, our decade of experience reveals perhaps 5 - 7 million words, numbers and phrases which ultimately have practical utility as a domain name. When you consider the hundreds of millions of companies and individuals which want to control their own destiny and enhance the location of their website, there simply are not enough "good" names to go around."